Echo Park Rise Up: A Reading List

 

We stand with the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake who were forcibly removed from the park last week by LAPD and Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell. 

We see our houseless neighbors who continually build foundations and communities with what little is available, foundations the city seems intent on bulldozing for the sake of a misguided optics of order/civility. We recognize and reject the police brutality at the core of the city’s tent-clearing project.    

We fear this precedent set by our city will be used to displace people from LA’s other public parks, such as MacArthur Park or Lincoln Park. 

In the midst of an ongoing public health emergency, destroying what stability those communities have been able to achieve and forcing the unhoused into ever more precarious living situations is not a solution to LA's acute housing crisis. As we have witnessed in our own neighborhood of Los Feliz, homelessness is a structural issue with many roots, and cannot be solved by harassment of the unhoused or by their criminalization and incarceration.

 

A deeper dive on some of the issues surrounding poverty and homelessness can be found in our book list below. We believe these texts illuminate the long history of the housing crisis in Los Angeles and light the way towards alternative solutions that call on all of us to prioritize care, mutual aid, and solidarity with our unhoused neighbors. 

 

If you'd like to make your voice heard on this issue, you can find your Neighborhood Council and your L.A. City Councilmember using the council districts map, and you can find the email addresses for the mayor and all the city councilmembers on the city directory.